


water is thicker than blood

by kwritten



Series: Femlash February 2016 [14]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-24 01:03:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6136096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for the prompt: Caroline/Bonnie/Elena – playing with magic<br/><i>When they were younger, maybe, they would stay up late like it was a novelty – like they weren’t made of moonlight and starlight and tiny bright things that only shine in the dark and have no place in the sun – and tell each other secrets they thought were secrets. </i><br/><i>Elena always knew what Bonnie was going to say before she said it and Bonnie always knew what Elena was thinking even if she said nothing at all and Caroline always knew what was worrying them but never said anything and Elena always knew what Caroline was feeling insecure about that at that moment and Bonnie always knew what Elena didn’t want to talk about and they all just knew all the things that the other didn’t want to say out loud. </i><br/><i>When they were younger, maybe, they would stay up late like it was a novelty – like they weren’t creatures that needed to hide away from the light and could only exist in the dark. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	water is thicker than blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).



_We’re like sisters, but with really different hair._

_(They are nothing like sisters, they have never been anything but sisters, they are everything that sisters could be but shouldn’t and that’s fine. They are what they are and also what they become and somehow that’s still fine.)_

 

 

The first time Elena wakes up with lake water on her tongue, they are there, standing nearby, while Jeremy sleeps in a chair by the window. Their eyes are the first thing that she registers and because their eyes are sad, she knows she woke up to sadness and pain. Their eyes tell her everything she needs to know about the world, everything she wants to know is reflected back at her. They never let their eyes tell her things she’d rather not know, and yet they are all honest. 

She wonders, as they come forward and grab her hand, all six intertwined as if they were made that way, what _her_ eyes tell them. She thinks sometimes, as they look down at her with sad eyes, so sad so sad, that maybe her eyes reveal the truths they’d all rather forget. 

Tears trickle down her face and she is awake, so that’s something, and they are holding her hand, so maybe that’s the _something_ that matters. 

 

 _Doppelgängers are like magical batteries, little orbs of energy just floating around and around, waiting for someone to gobble them up. Bonnie never tells Elena that, never tells her that the magic is always, always_ simpler _and kinder when Elena is near, that it doesn’t tear something from out of her bones when she reaches for it. She never tells her, doesn’t want to add to the pile of things that Elena is responsible for; doesn’t want to add to the complications of their … whatever they were._

_“Elena,” she whispered and then flicked her wrist. The lights went out and a candle nearby flickered into being, casting a warm glow on their skin._

_Elena clapped her hands like a little girl, like when she_ was _a little girl and Bonnie let her, because it almost felt like they weren’t slowly learning the world around them wasn’t made for them, made for the children they had once been or never been or couldn’t have been._

_When she finally leaned in to kiss her, candles alight all around the room, magic sparked between them because they were both made of magic, kissing was like drowning in it, like falling asleep and waking up and there was only the two of them in a pool of the magic that ran through their veins._

_And she never tells Elena how powerful it feels just to sit beside her._

 

The first time Bonnie uses magic intentionally there’s no one around to see and so it doesn’t feel real, it feels real the moment she lets those feathers fly around on Elena’s bed and watches her friend light up like magic is the most _magical_ thing in the entire world. It’s worth it, then: being so different so full so separate so _changed_ to see those eyes, those dark eyes that have seen far too much (and this was still in the beginning, when they were all still infants and there was so much the world was waiting to throw at them), turn so bright, as if the world was _only_ full of delightful things and Bonnie herself was the window into that brightness. 

She wonders, sitting there cross-legged on Elena’s bed – where she has spent so many happy sad desperate laughing crying moments – if there is a difference between joy and despair in the brain. Do different spots light up when you look at the signals flaring to and fro? This tightness in her chest, these tears in the corner of her eyes, this feeling of being so so _full_ , is it the same as being empty?

They laugh because they are young and they are girls and young girls love to laugh and there is a purity in it. She wants to bottle it up and hold onto it so tight, open the bottle on dark nights and relive this moment over and over again until all she is can be summed up in this moment. Because maybe it doesn’t matter and maybe it does but it is _something_.

 

_When they were younger, maybe, they would stay up late like it was a novelty – like they weren’t made of moonlight and starlight and tiny bright things that only shine in the dark and have no place in the sun – and tell each other secrets they thought were secrets._

_Elena always knew what Bonnie was going to say before she said it and Bonnie always knew what Elena was thinking even if she said nothing at all and Caroline always knew what was worrying them but never said anything and Elena always knew what Caroline was feeling insecure about that at that moment and Bonnie always knew what Elena didn’t want to talk about and they all just knew all the things that the other didn’t want to say out loud._

_When they were younger, maybe, they would stay up late like it was a novelty – like they weren’t creatures that needed to hide away from the light and could only exist in the dark._

_It made sense, when they thought about it later, that Bonnie first kissed Elena on a hot summer day in the shade of a tree and that Elena first kissed Caroline at midnight one holiday and that Caroline first kissed Bonnie while they watched the sunrise – because to be properly kissed, it had to be at a magical hour, when the whole world was on the cusp of something else._

_They had no way to know – when they were young – that they were just beginning, that they had to change, that they were never going to be this shape and size again._

_But children rarely think about their own mortality._

 

The first time Caroline knew that the world was different, that she was different, that there was something inexplicably insane about everything around her, she was in bed next to a man that could use his eyes to make her hide this truth from everyone she loved. (As if she wasn’t terribly accustomed to eyes pinning her down into secrets she was far too young to carry.) She carried the weight of _difference_ on her shoulders and it was frightening it was terrifying it should have felt powerful but it wasn’t. She winked at Bonnie, but Bonnie didn’t see. She smiled broadly at Elena, but Elena hid what they both knew as if that would change anything. 

She talked and laughed and played the way she always had and she wondered if this was what the world had always been. She watched her best friend her sister her other half her honesty hide a truth that they both knew and she wasn’t allowed to say and she wanted to cry but her eyes were dry. 

She woke up and found them all changed, and she couldn’t say it. Her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth, she wore a scarf to cover their wounds and she baked a cake to appease their appetites for normalcy and around her the whole world spun in the opposite direction and it was almost like taking reality for granted. They looked at her and they didn’t see and it wasn’t the first time, it was the most normal thing about this whole damn clusterfuck of a Damon situation.

 

_Secrets were never the things that held them together, but none tore them apart either. Secrets were what they were hiding behind their eyes and their smiles and their intertwined hands. Even without meaning to do it. Even without saying the lies they needed to be true out loud in the harsh light of day._

_Secrets were embedded on every cell in their fragile bodies._

_Even after they stopped being so fragile._

_(They were never as fragile as the world said they should be.  
They were never as strong as the world demanded they should be. _

_They were always and never enough of something.)_

 

The second time Caroline knew that the world was different and that she was different and that her place in the world had been changed forever, she was alone. Change always happened under the cover of solitary silences. That was the only way to make it permanent. Had _they_ been there, with their eyes and their _knowing_ , she would have never changed, would have reverted back into the thing that they wanted to see. It was amazing that any of them ever changed even the smallest bit, when they were all three always watching each other, waiting to put them back into the shape that they had always been. 

She wondered if it was more murderous to change or to refuse someone else the right to evolve. She wondered why she was always the first one to know that things wouldn’t just go back to the way they were before, why she was always the one that fought so hard to keep things _normal_. As if normal was a thing that they could even pretend to be anymore – after growing and growing and growing so tall that the lines they drew on the wall in Elena’s room with shaky childish hands marked a sense of permanence instead of a daily reminder that change was inevitable. 

She breathed in deep and she felt her hunger and she was thankful to be alone, lying in that bed, waiting for them to arrive, walk through the door, and see her for what she _had been_ instead of what she _was_. She would always be the first one of them to change and maybe always be the first one that knew they all _had_ to change, but it didn’t mean she had to like it. She hated it. She loved it; it was the only thing that was all hers.

 

 _”Let’s pretend,” Caroline started, her arms heavy with bags and a bright smile on her face. She was always either smiling or screaming, she never learned how to exist between extremes. Or maybe crying and screaming so often, being broken so thoroughly so many times, made that smile and that perky_ hello _all the more important for her to cling to._

_“Pretend what?” Elena sounded tired. She let them hear it, sometimes. Only sometimes. She hid more and more and more these days. She was pulling away from them and clinging tighter with every day that passed. They were everything and nothing to her and it was the most frightening fact Bonnie had ever considered._

_“That our lives don’t suck,” Caroline was always the honest one._

_They made root beer floats and watched a terrible Nicholas Sparks movie and Bonnie braided Elena’s hair with only her thoughts because her fingers were being held tight by Caroline, who always cried during movies like this like it was a right like it was her purpose in life. They fell asleep all tangled together in Elena’s bed like they were still children (they would never not be children in all the ways that didn’t seem to count anymore) except that Bonnie didn’t need to get up to turn off the lights or blow out the candles and no one’s pillow ever fell off the bed and if all those things were all that had ever changed, maybe it wouldn’t have felt so sad._

 

The second time Bonnie uses magic for one of them intentionally, it isn’t a game, it’s tragic and it’s disgusting and she’s understandably _pissed_. Magic should be for lighting Elena’s smile, not for supporting Caroline’s new status as a killer. She’s not mad at Caroline, not really, she’s angry at the entire universe for making _this_ her world. Feathers twirling in the air and smiles and tears and childhood still within reach. _That_ was magic. That was who and what she wanted to be and give. To give joy and joy and joy. To float feathers. 

She wonders if this was the beginning or the end, sitting on Caroline’s bed and using magic so they could pretend that everything was the same, that they were all still normal. This is far from normal. This is blood and death and magic for all the wrong reasons and the world spinning the wrong direction (did Caroline say that?) (did Elena say that?) this is not at all the way she saw their lives turning out, they are going backwards or sideways, pulled into a world she wants to hate but it feeds them, feeds all of them, proving them so much stronger than they ever thought they’d need to be, but always knew they could. 

She storms out of the house and breathes deep in the sunshine. She gave Caroline sunshine today. She gave Elena hope an eon ago, when they were both just entering this new space and calling it _magic_. She breathes deep and hopes tomorrow magic will be magic again. 

 

_They like to pretend that nothing has changed. And also that everything is exactly as it is. There’s a security in sitting on Elena’s bed and chatting about the taste of blood and the price of magic. As if they were all still discussing what dress to wear to winter formal. As if it were totally normal to be discussing blood instead of what was served in the cafeteria that afternoon. As if it were totally normal to be fighting for their lives instead of worrying about their history final. _

_They like to make Bonnie perform tricks. She likes showing them playful things, likes living with them in their games and their laughter, likes clinging to the idea that maybe maybe maybe they could just stay like this, right here like this._

_Where magic is pure and full of laughter and not their last defense against the madness of their stupid awful lives. Where they are all alive together instead of undead and dying._

_She is dying as surely as they are not and never will. She is dying with every step she takes and they will exist so far after her that she will become a memory. She wants this to be their memory. _

_Her magic, weaving them together. Their kisses and her fingers and their soft skin and her words all together in a bright light and a soft world wanting them to all live and live and live even if they cannot.)_

 

The second time Elena wakes up with lake water on her tongue, she is alone, but she can smell them hear them sense them, they are connected to her as if it was _their_ blood running through her veins that woke her up and not a boy a boy a boy who is not them. Being alone, in this moment, feels right in every way that being with them always feels _necessary_. 

She wonders, lying there on a cold slab of metal naked as the day she was born (the first time, the most inconsequential time, the small and painful time), what their eyes will tell her this time. Will she see something new in them? Are they past the point of needing to lie? Was there ever a time when lying wasn’t as essential to the way they fit as breathing?

She breathes deep through her nose and her lungs don’t fill up the way they used to and maybe that’s a new normal. Maybe her eyes will tell them something about her that she’s not ready for them to see. Maybe her eyes will tell them something about her they’ve always known and she refused to admit and maybe this time when they look back, she’ll see what they see. And maybe it will be the first time she doesn’t hide from it. 

 

 

_They walk arm in arm always keeping pace with each other and that’s not anything, not anything at all, but when one can run like the wind and the other can become wind and the third can become water that falls like droplets from the sky, then walking arm in arm feels like something._

_Even if it is nothing at all._

**Author's Note:**

> opening line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the immortal words of Cordelia Chase


End file.
